Underheight.com

a hippopotamus, of course!

from last night’s SNL — simply awesome, because it’s 100% true:

One of the best I’ve seen so far in the current issue of Atlantic Monthly. (Yes, I now subscribe to Atlantic Monthly again — they made an offer I couldn’t refuse). It’s available free online in its entirety.

The essential points are:

1. There’s a difference between “health”, “health care”, and “health insurance”. One is your state of being that’s affected by many things — job, housing, family, goal attainment, etc.; one is the actual methods of keeping you healthy, mainly medically; and the other is one of many methods to pay for health care.

2. None of the reforms really address the core issue — reliance on employer (or government) provided insurance to pay for almost every medical procedure. Therefore, the patient is not the actual consumer, so normal market forces cannot apply in driving down costs while increasing value, quality, and access. Medical insurance should only be used for truly catastrophic ($50,000+ / year) events.

A simple analogy — when I got new windows in my house, I paid for it, not my homeowner’s insurance. And even if my homeowner’s insurance covered new windows, it would be due to a catastrophe — a tornado, for example. And, my employer would have 0 to do with it.

Also, I just got new brakes on my car. Again, I paid for it, not my auto insurance. And even if my auto insurance paid for it, it would be due to a catastrophe — an accident. And, again, my employer would have nothing to do with it.

I don’t agree with all the solutions proposed — having federal government involvement in providing the catastrophic insurance is ripe for tinkering and abuse and we’re just as likely to end up worse off than we are now. Also, mandating insurance is neither constitutional nor desired from a market-oriented approach. Even with those caveats on part of the proposed solution, this article is one of the best I’ve seen on this debate so far.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200909/health-care

No good can come of this, especially when the left coasters in Oregon were the first state to try it.

Brian Jennings, author of ”Censorship: The Threat to Silence Talk Radio,” was interviewed by Monica Crowley, Talk Radio Host on C-SPAN’s Book TV recently.

Here’s the hour long podcast

If that link doesn’t work for you, try this one

ABC announced it was cancelling the new Mike Judge series “The Goode Family”.

“The Goode family struggles with modern social and environmental responsibilities being liberals, and the paradoxes that arise for a working-class family when trying to be politically correct all of the time about everything.” (Wikipedia)

I saw a few of the 13 episodes and thought they were funny and really promising. It was a good combination of thoughtful political humor and modern American life.

ABC originally ran it on Wednesdays for a few weeks in late May and early June. Then the NBA playoffs moved the show to Friday nights where it stayed. Of course the ratings were terrible! Putting on a new series, in the summer, on Fri. nights?

ABC also never posted full episodes online — none at the show’s site on ABC.com nor on hulu.

This is a perfect show for getting linked to on the blogosphere. Given ABC’s lackluster online presence compared to other networks (especially NBC), I’m not surprised. I’m also not surprised that a show mocking modern suburban liberal attitudes was cancelled by a bunch of modern suburban liberals.

Mike Judge is a comic genius. Hopefully this show finds a good home somewhere else. Comedy Central always seems to be trying new things. And Fox seems to like restarting cancelled shows when they have a shot — see Family Guy and Futurama

So, if you want to bring back the Goode Family, send ABC an email and sign up for notification on Amazon when the DVD is ready.

Due to filesystem space issues, I had to upload a tar file to filesystem A but needed to extract it on filesystem B.

The tar file was less than the size of filesystem A. The tar file was less than the size of filesystem B. However, doubling the size of the tar file was greater than the size of filesystem A. Also, doubling the size of the tar file was greater than the size of filesystem B. That is, the extracted contents of the tarball should be the same size as the tarball itself; and the tar file is not deleted as a result of the extraction process.

In other words, I couldn’t do the typical upload to filesystem A and extract to filesystem A. I also couldn’t set the directory path when creating the tarball since that path didn’t exist on the destination server (and also couldn’t be created — the tar was created from a DVD).

LinuxQuestions.org provided the answer. I actually needed to do this on a Solaris 10 system and it worked fine.

cd /path/to/where/files/are/required
cat /path/to/file.tar | tar xf -

Although, I would do this command instead
– to add verbosity (the v) so I could monitor easier
– and throw it in the background (the &) so if my network connection dropped it would still run fine

cat /path/to/file.tar | tar xvf - &

Here’s a good site with basic info on how to use tar if you need more help.

Major League Baseball will soon be installing cameras in all stadiums to gather petabytes of positional data.

A half-century after Branch Rickey harrumphed, “There is nothing on earth anybody can do with fielding,” all these pixels and bits will almost certainly revolutionize the analysis of baseball glovework. Even the most traditional fans may appreciate the importance of on-base percentage and other modern offensive statistics, but they still rate fielders by errors and fielding percentage, which are about as computationally sophisticated as a horse clomping its hoof.

The primary job of a fielder is to turn batted balls into outs: an infielder by gobbling up ground balls and throwing them to a base, and an outfielder by catching as many fly balls as possible. But errors (and the rate of not making errors, which is fielding percentage) measure only a fielder’s glaring mistakes — they ignore the more important matter of who reaches balls that others do not.A half-century after Branch Rickey harrumphed, “There is nothing on earth anybody can do with fielding,” all these pixels and bits will almost certainly revolutionize the analysis of baseball glovework. Even the most traditional fans may appreciate the importance of on-base percentage and other modern offensive statistics, but they still rate fielders by errors and fielding percentage, which are about as computationally sophisticated as a horse clomping its hoof.

The primary job of a fielder is to turn batted balls into outs: an infielder by gobbling up ground balls and throwing them to a base, and an outfielder by catching as many fly balls as possible. But errors (and the rate of not making errors, which is fielding percentage) measure only a fielder’s glaring mistakes — they ignore the more important matter of who reaches balls that others do not.

Fans and team executives have recently developed systems to track how many balls are hit to each area of the field, where fielders are positioned and whether balls are hit hard, but they rely on eyeballed estimates. The new camera-tracking system will assess it all to the inch.

This is a much more robust system than the GPS-enabled shoes I mentioned in a post a couple years ago.

The camera system has been quietly tested and refined in the San Francisco Giants’ ballpark this season by Sportvision, the Bay Area company that developed the yellow first-down line for football broadcasts and car-tracking software for Nascar races. Sportvision has worked with Major League Baseball Advanced Media, the league’s Internet subsidiary, in the venture that will eventually cost upward of $5 million to install the system in all 30 stadiums, according to executives involved with the project.

Toyota Develops Mind-Controlled Wheelchair

As featured in Popular Science, a one eyed filmmaker gets a camera eye: The Eyeborg Project. More videos here.

Dozens of them on youtube’s citizentube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/citizentube#play/user/E3C4E98C33E94D21M